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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Tomasz Bednarczyk - Summer Feelings

If this is the way summer feels to TomaszBednarczyk then Mr. Bednarczyk must make his summer home in a fuzz addled TV buzzing in some abandoned field in the middle of nowhere. Really, Bednarczyk lives in Poland where wintery summers are the norm. This fact brings some understanding to summer feelings built out of sparse, fragile pianos delicately played under a dusty layer of electronic tape hiss. Similar in feel to (though not quite as mammoth in spectrum as) Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic or William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, Bednarczyk’s Summer Feelings plods slowly and introspectively as if it were trudging through a snow storm of static. The crackle is subtle and everything seems slightly blurry as if viewed through coke bottle lenses. Despite the frostiness of the work there is a definite heart buried underneath the layers of sound. An under current of warm synths and the occasional use of field recordings underscore a humanity caught in the midst of the scrambled white out, steering it to constantly redeeming territory. This really is an amazing accomplishment for Bednarczyk, who maintains a confident restraint well beyond his years (he’s 22 years old if my math is right). I mean this stuff could easily be attributed to the aforementioned artists who are both decades older the Tomasz. Summer Feelings is a beautifully quaint, cordial exercise in gorgeous melancholy and a stunning debut for Room40 by an exciting new (to me), young artist.